big issues

What began as a supposedly routine search of this single-wide in the Tennessee woods took a terrible turn when one cop shot his partner dead. Was it just a tragic accident—or was it premeditated, cold-blooded murder? read more

Fourteen years ago, in one of the worst genocides in recent history, nearly a million Rwandan Tutsis and their sympathizers were butchered in the span of one hundred days. How does an impoverished African nation ever recover from that? By wooing tourists, of course. Jay Kirk takes a holiday in Rwanda, where the hotels, the golf, and the unspeakably profound encounters with mountain gorillas exist in surreal relation to a very dark past read more

Think $4 for a gallon of gas is screwing with your summer? Wait until you hear about something called peak oil. According to a growing number of experts—and weíre not just talking about conspiracy wackos here—weíre on the brink of an economic crisis that could lead to, well, the end of life as we know it. Benjamin Kunkel investigates just how scary things are about to become read more

In the first six months of this year, nearly 500 people have been murdered in the border city of Juárez, Mexico: An unprecedented streak of gore that has claimed police and shop owners, cocaine users and innocent bystanders. But if you think itís just the cartels and crooked cops doing all the killing, you don't know half the story. Charles Bowden visits the front line of Mexico's bloody new war on drugs read more

Thereís a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where every American soldier injured in Iraq and Afghanistan is brought, treated—if only for a few days—and then sent home. Devin Friedman follows the story of a planeload of men and their week in this miraculous netherworld between war and peace, life and death read more

Five years ago, Gene Robinson was elected the first openly gay Christian bishop, causing the greatest crisis the modern Protestant community has ever faced. Will his love for another man rip the church in two? We're about to find out read more

When William Heirens confessed to three of the grisliest murders in Chicago history, Harry Truman was in the White House and the nightly TV-news broadcast hadnít yet been invented. And now, sixty-two years later—after much of the evidence against him has fallen apart—heís still behind bars, praying for at least one free day of adult life before he dies read more

Suicide bombers, crooked mullahs, desperate dictators, ancient grudges, the long arm of the American empire, and the will of 165 million Pakistani voters. If you thought you knew what just happened in Pakistanís election—or where the country is headed—youíre wrong read more

Two centuries of heedless gorging and historic wastefulness has left us with an intractable environmental problem: What do we do with our trash? More specifically, what do we do with the 250 million tons (thatís five pounds per person per day) of pizza boxes, beer bottles, shredded lettuce, old refrigerators, and half-eaten burritos that we throw away each year? read more